-{ redgeek.net }-

After the craziness of last weekend, I wanted something a bit more subdued for this weekend. After a family dinner on Friday, most of my weekend, aside from studying and training, was spent nose-in-book. I finished Gravity’s Rainbow (my god, amazing, it cannot share a post with another book), Pynchon’s early stories in Slow Learner (holy shit, some of his early stuff was so bad – and some brilliant), and re-read High Fidelity. I’d spotted _HF_ in a used bookstore when I was selling off a bunch of books, and thought it’d make a good one-day re-read. I forgot how similar (and so dissimilar) I am to the protagonist. Choice quotes:

Me, I’m unmarried – at the moment as unmarried as it’s possible to be – and I’m the owner of a failing record shop. It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can’t afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You’ve got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you’ve got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you’re compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship. Maybe Al Green is directly responsible for more than I ever realized.

“I’m sorry to go on about it. But, I don’t know, there’s a lesson in here somewhere, and I want to make sure you get it.”

“I get it. You like Sting but you don’t like Junior Wells, because you’ve never heard of him.”

“You’re being deliberately obtuse.”

“I am, actually, yes.”

She gets up to go.

“Well, think about it.”

And later on, I think what for? What’s the point of thinking about it? If I ever have another relationship, I’ll buy her, whoever she is, stuff that she ought to like but doesn’t know about; that’s what new boyfriends are for.

“So what should I be doing?”

“I don’t know. Something. Working. Seeing people. Running a scout troop, or running a club even. Something more than waiting for life to change and keeping your options open. You’d keep your options open for the rest of your life, if you could. You’ll be lying on your deathbed, dying of some smoking-related disease, and you’ll be thinking, ‘Well, at least I’ve kept my options open. At least I never ended up doing something I couldn’t back out of.’ And all the time you’re keeping your options open, you’re closing them off.”

“Who’s it for?” Laura asks when she sees me fiddling around with fades and running orders and levels.

“Oh, just that woman who interviewed me for the free paper. Carol? Caroline? Something like that. She said it would be easier, you know, if she had a feel for the kind of music we play.” But I can’t say it without blushing and staring intently at the cassette deck, and I know she doesn’t really believe me. She of all people knows what compilation tapes represent.

“But it does, you see. Just because it’s a relationship, and it’s based on soppy stuff, it doesn’t mean you can’t make intellectual decisions about it. Sometimes you just have to, otherwise you’ll never get anywhere. That’s where I’ve been going wrong. I’ve been letting the weather and my stomach muscles and a great chord change in a Pretenders single make up my mind for me, and I want to do it for myself.”